


The Giver And The Gift

by breathtaken



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: BDSM, Canon Era, Cock & Ball Torture, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, S&M, Sex Magic, Under-negotiated Kink, sub!cullen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 02:26:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8603575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathtaken/pseuds/breathtaken
Summary: The one time he let her take his sight from him, the second or third time, the wolves of his memories were upon him in moments and he reacted with a burst of Silence that was not nearly as strong as he had once been capable of but still left her powerless for an hour, and unwilling for days.


  Before he could recover she’d stumbled to her feet again and pressed the sharp edge of a dagger to his throat, and he ripped the cloth from his eyes and tilted back his head as his headache bloomed fresh at his temples, wondering for one ridiculous moment if he could call this love – and if so, what sort of a person that made him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Content notes** : Deliberate infliction of pain; references to bleeding; implied lack of negotiation/safewords.

Cullen lies flat on his back, immobile, the force pressing him into the mattress a shifting latticework of power, invisible except for where the candlelight glints off it like metal. Thicker rings of it are banded around his cock and balls, and he grits his teeth against the steady pulsing of pleasure like a heartbeat because he still has his pride, this early in the evening at least.

His eyes are open. He never shuts them, gaze flicking between the starry sky above and the woman standing at the foot of his bed, her densely-muscled fighter’s frame seeming almost delicate swathed in one of his shirts and little else, lightning arcing lazily between her fingertips just to see his breath catch; the one time he let her take his sight from him, the second or third time, the wolves of his memories were upon him in moments and he reacted with a burst of Silence that was not nearly as strong as he had once been capable of but still left her powerless for an hour, and unwilling for days.

Before he could recover she’d stumbled to her feet again and pressed the sharp edge of a dagger to his throat, and he ripped the cloth from his eyes and tilted back his head as his headache bloomed fresh at his temples, wondering for one ridiculous moment if he could call this love – and if so, what sort of a person that made him.

He’s never been in love, not really. He’s never known tenderness returned from a woman who was free to give it, without the slow-creeping nausea of wondering if she had opened herself to him through fear or for protection, a bargaining chip for the day they turned on her.

No, his eyes are open and this is better, perversely (and of course, _perversely_ ). The man he was at Kinloch – barely a man, with all of a man’s hard lessons still ahead of him – could never have dreamt of the things she does to him, and even the sick sense-memory of having his secret heart turned inside-out, his desires twisted, _gutted_ … well. He would rather she whip him till he bleeds, beg for her entirely without shame, be brought to the edge over and over and know nothing else than want, than to ever have her pliant beneath him and that _look_ , that hunted look, that demon’s look.

She’s come a long way, since they started; her earliest rings of force made for clumsy manacles that sometimes slipped out of place or didn’t hold their shape, pressing until the nerves of his fingers sang or flickering in the face of his own will, almost letting him reach for her.

He doesn’t know if he’d want to. Doesn’t know if she’d be capable of that sort of tenderness, though he’s seen her comfort the desperate and the weary, even holding a crying Ambassador Montilyet close one evening when it all became too much to bear. Spoken plainly, he doesn’t know if she’d be capable of that towards _him,_ with what he was, with what he allows her.

She’s settled into the rhythm of their games that aren’t now, can make him scream and bleed and cry and come without ever touching his cock, and she never smiles when she comes to him; and he’s glad, really, that she hasn’t allowed him to find out.

The expression that’s on her face he wouldn’t call a smile as she flicks the spark she’s toying with at the head of his cock, and the bright burst of pain wipes his mind perfectly clean.

He’s almost got his breath back when she hits him with another, and then another. Some days fire, some days ice, but they both like the lightning the best; and he likes her best when she’s like this, her cruelty not blunt and anger-driven but slower, more deliberate, a marked finesse.

She takes her time, takes her choice. She _sees_ him, and he sees what no-one else does.

She stalks around the foot of the bed until her face is in shadow, body silhouetted against the candlelight. Her nipples show hard behind the linen, and he longs to reach up and suckle through the fabric, pushes against her restraints just to feel their force, does it because he knows it won’t be lost on her.

And there it is as she turns, anyone else would miss it – that awkward flicker of feeling chasing across her features that tells him this isn’t _just_ about anger, or sadism, or curiosity. That she _cares_ , as much as she knows how, as little as she’d really be able to express it.

Ostwick was one of the better Circles. For what it’s worth.

Sometimes when she doesn’t know he’s watching, he’s seen her stand in the Skyhold courtyard and look up at the sky like she can’t quite believe it’s real.

And he wants nothing more in those moments than to step up silently behind her and take her in his arms, like his father always did his mother, like Jacen and Mia – but that’s not who they are, it’s a world away, and most nights now he lays his head in her lap like a hound and imagines himself shrinking and her growing, surrounding, encompassing.

The candles flicker as she lies down beside him, folds his legs up with a gesture, and presses a flame-wreathed palm to the back of his thigh until he cries out.

Her timing is perfect, as usual: when the searing heat turns to the soothe of healing magic he’s still reeling from the pain, but she paused just long enough to make it seem an afterthought –

– and imagine if she _hadn’t_ , her handprint upon him aching and throbbing for hours, eventually scarring, marking him as hers, _branding_ –

His cock swells again, and the ring around it tightens in response.

She settles into a rhythm after that: pulsing constriction and relief, brilliant pinpricks of pain that shoot right down his cock and lower still; the elements tripping over his skin, only the colour of the magic to tell him the exact nature of their agony. She looks at his genitalia with a scholar’s disinterest, like it’s an errant contraption she’s in the process of calibrating, and it’s just the right amount of shameful.

He’s never felt like he does with her. Like he’s both the giver and the gift, the pleasure somehow growing with the pain, feeding off it. Everything is hazy and yet his thoughts are simpler, reminding him of another, purer time, when he set aside all that he was in order to serve.

To serve and to suffer, and he’d forgotten how Maker-blessed _good_ it feels.

When she flips him over he leans into the movement, though it’s all magic that takes him to his knees, forearms braced against the mattress, exposing him; and something clenches in his chest because _this_ is what he wants most of all, even if he’d never be able to admit it to another soul. To _take_ for her, to be breached, conquered –

He feels the tingle of magic back there that will make him slick for her –no doubt learned from one of those hundred-times folded and refolded papers covertly passed around at every Circle in the land – and he can feel his face heating with the exquisite shame of it where it’s pressed against the pillow, though he isn’t sure he could explain it to her so she could understand.

She’s a woman of action. She does what’s instinctual and doesn’t ask why, it only matters that he’s willing; and maybe this _is_ love, because doesn’t he already know that he wouldn’t want to answer?

She has phalluses for this, smooth, weighty stone, magic-warmed; and no matter how many times they do this he’s never quite prepared for the moment she pushes inside his body, the intrusion of it strange, _wrong_ until she pulls back and pleasure sparks through him like chain lightning. He clenches his jaw as she fucks him, tamping down on half-formed pleas to the Maker and to her because he doesn’t _want_ to plead, not really, wants to take what he’s given and ask for nothing more, the sensation already skirting the edge of what he can bear.

He dimly registers her weight shifting on the mattress behind him, but when she reaches forward and wraps her other hand around his cock he gasps aloud, in shock and in pleasure. He’s sore from all she’s inflicted upon him and being touched is the sweetest agony, only the ring of force keeping him from coming already; and as she works him he can’t hold back the sounds any longer, wailing long and low in his throat until without warning all her magic drops away and he comes so hard it winds him.

He recovers his faculties as she pulls the phallus slowly from him, and as ever this is the hardest part: the price for forgetting himself for a while is the acute awareness of what happened just moments ago, that he let her hurt him and liked it, even though he knows logically that it could not be otherwise. He let her hurt him and he liked it and he came without even touching her, he served her perfectly but he took and took and gave nothing, and when she pushes him onto his back again and straddles his face he reaches for her and draws her close, wondering if she’s simply taking what she wants, or if she knows, and is giving.


End file.
